There has only been one confirmed case of someone in the United States being killed by Mexican influenza.

What About Regular, Seasonal Influenza?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than 13,000 people have died from plain old everyday seasonal flu so far this year. That’s right, folks, it is regular flu that is going to kill you. About 36,000 people will die this year from the regular flu.

When You Hear Hooves, Think Horses, Not Zebras

Every minute your company wastes thinking about Mexican influenza is a minute it isn’t thinking about actual, real daily problems:

• If your server crashed, do you have a backup?
• Can a disgruntled employee walk off with your client database?
• How many hours does Larry surf for porn each day?
• Would you pass a Sarbanes-Oxley audit?
• Can you access Quickbooks from a hotel in Nebraska?
• If your computer guy left town, would you have the password to your servers?
• Is the reason you’d have the password because everyone has the password or there is no password?

These are the questions you should be asking yourself.

Mexican influenza? SARS? Hurricanes? Who cares?

What I Learned from the 2004/2005/2006 Hurricanes

Clients understand natural disasters. Suppliers understand being without power for a couple days.

The company for which I was IT Director went offline for about 11 hours after the 2005 hurricanes. After that we operated with reduced staff on generator power. We still had phones and an internet connection but we weren’t quite as crisp as we were with a full staff.

Guess what? Our clients didn’t mind. They had their own hurricanes, ice storms, mud slides, wild fires or earthquakes to worry about. They recognized the situation was temporary and, for the most part, outside our control.

On The Other Hand, Local Problems Embarrassing

When an entire town is offline, clients understand.

When the sky is blue, the birds are chirping and your entire company can’t get email, that is when your company looks bad. That is the situation you need to protect against. That is a far more common problem and annoyance than employees out sick or dead.

Look at the Odds and Plan Accordingly

Money for technology infrastructure is finite number. In fact, for many companies right now, it might be an imaginary number.

After the post-9/11 anthrax attacks, a lot of people ran out and bought gas masks, duct tape and plastic sheeting. That was a waste of time and money.

Before wasting money on the technological equivalent of duct tape and plastic sheeting, a company really needs to figure out if it is worth protecting itself from something so unlikely.

Corral the Horses, Let the Zebras Run Free

There are plenty of good reasons to implement a virtualized, hosted, SAN-based, redundant, super fancy IT infrastructure but Mexican flu and hurricanes are so far down the list as to be irrelevant.

Cheers,
Matt

My wife IM’d me from the other room (that way she doesn’t disturb me while I am working… love her thoughtfulness) to tell me about it. She said, “Thankfully you work from home already”.

Before I started with DedicatedIT I had worked from home for almost 5 years. During that time, I was granted the luxury to be here during her pregnancy with our son and then watch him grow for the first few years of his life (our bond is amazing, something most working parents don’t get these days). When I had to go back to an office environment, it was tough on him and I but it also opened me up to catching the flu and a cold or two that I hadn’t had to experience in a long time. Now, timing couldn’t have been better. My wife is now 37 weeks pregnant with our daughter and I am thankful that we (as a company) work remotely so I may experience the first years of our daughter’s life along with all of those other ‘firsts’ (first laugh, first crawl, first step, first cold, etc.) that I was able to be there for with our son. It also allows me to be self-quarantined from these dangerous and potentially deadly diseases that spread like wild fire in closed, close-nit environments like an office, bus or train.

I remember that the old days of VPNs and Remote Terminals or LogMeIns/GoToMyPCs was such a hassle. Now with Citrix it makes my work life so much easier. The old adage of “no matter where you go, there you are” rings true each day as I launch all of my needed applications from home (or even the hospital during those ‘false labors’).

If you have/want this capability or if you know of someone that would benefit from it like I have all these years, reach out to DedicatedIT and let them (us) make it a reality. Just think of the travel time, downtime and money (at the very least) that it will save you and your company in the long run.

“So there is a small chance that if you get the current relatively safe version of swine flu, your immune system may be far more capable of fighting off a more lethal variant that could turn up later. In effect you might get just enough of an inoculation through contact with this first virus to save your life should the pandemic strain turn nasty.”

http://aardvark.co.nz/daily/2009/0428.shtml